I was in a really good mood one morning this week until I read an email from a federal government worker buddy of mine from the Beltway.

“Please notice the first ‘worst’ job listed … (I know, you are a columnist, but …),” he wrote. He signed off with the smiley-face symbol that I find either too cute or really annoying, depending on the message. His was frankly irritating after I clicked to a link he sent.

Up came a story about an annual survey and ranking of the worst and best jobs in America.

At the top of the worst list was “newspaper reporter.” No way. Lumberjacks ranked second-worst, followed by enlisted military personnel. Now, I would think dodging a falling tree or a mortar shell is far worse than dodging a whip-cracking editor like Hal Davis as deadline approaches. Actor, oil rig worker, dairy farmer, meter maid, mail carrier, roofer and flight attendant rounded out the 10 worst.

“Newspaper reporters have fared poorly in the report for years due to the job’s high stress and tight deadlines, low pay and requirement to work in all conditions to get the story,” stated CareerCast.com, a jobs-search online site which annually ranks 200 of the top and bottom jobs. “Ever-shrinking newsrooms, dwindling budgets and competition from Internet businesses have created a very difficult environment …”

Tony Lee, the online site’s publisher, added more salt: “There are many jobs in communications that offer better hours, greater stability, a work/life balance and a healthier hiring outlook than being a newspaper reporter.”

“High pay, low stress, a robust hiring outlook, a healthy work environment and minimal physical exertion combine to make actuary the top job for 2013,” the survey takers noted this week. An actuary assesses risk probabilities using statistical data. They mostly work for insurance companies and financial firms.

Biomedical engineer came in second, followed by software engineer. Audiologist (can you hear me now?), financial planner, dental hygienist (there’s a whole slew of them in town this week for a convention), occupational therapist, optometrist, physical therapist and computer systems analyst make up the top 10 best list. The rankings were based on a convoluted (my take), hard-data-driven methodology and a score grading on four major categories found in all jobs: environment, income, outlook and stress.

So, for example, an actuary’s national median salary is $87,650, and the profession’s projected job growth is 27 percent. A newspaper reporter? The median annual paycheck is $36,000. The growth projection? Negative six. Ouch.

QUICK, FIND ME AN AMUSING ACTUARY

Now, I don’t want to throw dirt on actuaries. I don’t know one, and I’m sure there are good and decent and interesting folks among them. No, I won’t. The heck I won’t.

When was last time you went to see a movie with an actuary as the lead protagonist or one in a leading role?

Among newspaper reporters, we have, among many others: “All the President’s Men,” “The Front Page,” “His Girl Friday,” “The Killing Fields,” “State of Play,” “The Soloist” and “The Paper,” loosely based on my former employer, a New York City-based tabloid.

Superman, arguably the most popular comic-book superhero of all time, did not choose actuary as his civilian job cover. He chose “mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper.”

Actuaries? Let’s see. No superhero I know of. There was a 1948 movie titled “Get With it,” a musical comedy starring the late Donald O’Connor as an actuary forced to join a carnival after he misplaced a decimal point on a statistical table. Riveting stuff. Must have been a box-office blockbuster.

I asked folks to connect me with an actuary with a sense of humor for this piece. I was told that would be a nearly impossible task. I heard there’s a whole nest of them over at Securian, two blocks from the newsroom. Then I heard back they needed permission from corporate as well as from their mothers and then they had to devise a spreadsheet to assess whether there would be a probability of favorable outcome in publicly talking to me on the record.

A photographer volunteered a neighbor who is an actuary but added, “he’s not necessarily a funny guy, kind of quiet.”

THE JOB WILL LAST FOREVER

Now, I have heard kids in a playground talking about becoming a ballplayer, astronaut, firefighter, cop or even a TV journalist. I have never heard kids saying they want to grow up to be an actuary.

But Lee argues it’s time they should. He points out that jobs in science, technology, engineering and math, which make up most of the best jobs list, are the financially most fruitful, desired and promising jobs of the present and future here and across the globe. In fact, the most feedback he has received from the list, other than from journalists, is from teachers and educators who use it to convince students from elementary school on up that there’s a rewarding future in these fields.

“Actually, that’s what they want to hear more of at the playground,” Lee says, “that one day I want to grow up to be an actuary or a biomedical engineer.”

My mood did brighten after talking to Tony Carideo. He worked 14 years as a newspaperman, his last gig as business columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He left in 1994 to venture into the business/financial world. He now runs the Carideo Group, a Minneapolis-based investor and public relations consulting firm. He has been around actuaries and insurance types, and he confirms the conversations among the print ilk are far more vibrant and exciting.

“But actuaries have been on the top of these lists for a long time,” said Carideo, who acknowledged that he loved newspaper work and still misses it. “No, it is not exciting, but the insurance business is stable, and it’s the kind of job that will last forever.”

Still, the list caused quite a buzz and string of defiant rebukes from the peons at print newsrooms across the country, including here.

“I have the best job in America,” shot back Dave Orrick, our outdoors reporter. “They pay me — actually pay me — to go fishing. The joke’s on the biomedical engineers, if you ask me.”

Hold it. We’re paying Orrick for what he does? Now that’s shocking. Hold the presses. Sweetheart, get me rewrite.

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

As you comment, please be respectful of other commenters and other viewpoints. Our goal with article comments is to provide a space for civil, informative and constructive conversations. We reserve the right to remove any comment we deem to be defamatory, rude, insulting to others, hateful, off-topic or reckless to the community. See our full terms of use here.

More in Opinion

THE SHOWBOAT’S FUTURE Wanted: a management partner who will “creatively explore new programming and service opportunities” at a unique St. Paul riverfront facility. It’s the former Minnesota Centennial Showboat at Harriet Island Regional Park, and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department says its call for ideas is the “opportunity to re-imagine what this riverboat could be.” The department is seeking...

TEACHING USEFUL SKILLS Schools, are you listening? Joe Soucheray’s Dec. 1 column was brilliant. (“What’s next? Fancy signs in lunchrooms telling kids to chew?) Taking students with disciplinary problems and giving them a useful way to be productive, even teaching them a skill they could possibly use for future employment, is exactly what our schools should be doing. Snow and...

TRUMP’S NEXT CHAPTER Atticus Finch, the beloved father and lawyer in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is one of literature’s most admirable characters, defending a black man accused of raping a white woman in a bigoted Southern town. But what has come to be considered Lee’s original manuscript, “Go Set a Watchman,” which was published in 2015 after lying...

Though the presidential campaign did not focus much attention on it, the federal debt confronting President-elect Donald Trump is greater, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time since Harry Truman’s World War II term of office. Trump more than Democrat Hillary Clinton did give lip service but few specifics about the size of the growing national debt...

The best way to solve the conundrum of 11 million undocumented immigrants who are living, working and contributing to America right now has a name: “245(i).” Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act is a law that enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress in its 13 years of existence. It is still on the books, though it expired in 2001...

St. Paul’s Right of Way (ROW) assessment program has certainly had a rough few months. First, nonprofits succeeded in getting the Minnesota Supreme Court to declare the assessment a tax subject to constitutional restrictions on taxing nonprofits. In a rare moment of ideological Kumbaya, conservative and progressive policy organizations joined hands to argue against it at the Supreme Court, as...